Family Man

History is about human, not divine affairs. You are claiming that Scripture allows you a glimpse into the divine nature, which is what the NT authors were trying to do. Hence, these guys were not writing history.

I have a great deal more experience than that, including a degree from a major university in the subject. You should be more careful about what you presume.

And how many of their god-claims are currently accepted as true by modern historians? Why should your god-claim be handled differently?

Actually, they don't claim it is history. They may use the text to derive history, but they do indeed say "Hummph! That's not history! It's religion!" when considering whether the claims for that religion are true or not. At least, I don't think you'll find too many historians worshipping the Greek, Egyptian, Viking, or any other gods of the ancient world (outside of Christianity). Do try to understand this simple concept: the NT is primarily a religious work and most of the claims made therein are worthless as history. There is history there, but it won't lead anyone to conclude that Jesus was god any more than the writing of the priestly classes of other ancient societies would lead anyone to the "truth" of that religion.

As a record of their beliefs, absolutely. But no historian claims that any of those beliefs are actually true. Similarly, the NT is a tremendously valuable source for what the early Christians believed. It is worthless, however, in determining whether those beliefs are true in the historical sense.

When it deals with the human acts of the apostles, yes. When it makes claims of a fantastic nature that are obviously designed to promote a sectarian point of view, no.

Your inability to distinguish between history and religion puts the dummy tag on you. It'd be nice if you'd actually demonstrate that you understand the distinctions I'm making and address my points instead of going off on tangents and making unfounded personal attacks that aren't going to effect the outcome of this debate anyway.

Cheers

[ October 19, 2002: Message edited by: Family Man ]</p>

leonarde

Ion,
I wasn't intimating that you LIKED Marxism. I was
indicating that the way people THOUGHT ABOUT and
SPOKE ABOUT history was different in Communist
countries than it was (and is) in the West. In
the West, there ARE (a few)Marxist historians, but
their Marxism is a personal philosophy in most instances (ie it is rarely a Stalinist or Maoist
type of Marxism). Even those Marxists are heavily
outnumbered by non-Marxist historians. The latter
tend to have political and religious opinions across the full spectrum of thought.

Since history is highly "interpretive" it doesn't
lend itself to hard and fast pronouncements like
mathematics and engineering frequently do.
I'd be surprised if the situation is different in
France, but I'll ask my French pal, Thierry, the next chance I get.

Cheers!

leonarde

Posted by Family Man: But who were the apostles? The personal traveling companions of Jesus of Nazareth, the people to whom He (allegedly) appeared after the Resurrection. The people IN THE VERY BEST POSITION to determine whether the "ghost" was indeed he. If your a priori position is: the supernatural is bunk, then that is going to skewer
how you evaluate claims of supernatural events. Fair enough. But don't imagine you have
an open mind.

Cheers!

Benjamin Franklin

From an article by G.A. Wells

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/resurrection.html" target="_blank">A resurrection debate</a>

"Miethe also claimed that, according to 'the testimony of scholars throughout the . . . world', Luke-Acts offers reliable information about 'what was happening politically'. In actual fact their author is in such complete confusion over the chronology of events that occurred in Palestine in the first half of the first century as to suggest that he was not close in time or place to them.

Let me give examples. In Acts 5, where the scene is Jerusalem about the mid-30s, Gamaliel reviews bygone Messianic risings and mentions that of Theudas. But we know from the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (who lived in this first century AD) that Theudas' Messianic promises were made when Fadus was procurator (AD 44-46) and so could not have been known to Gamaliel at the time when he is represented as speaking. So conservative a Christian as F. F. Bruce--who is appealed to at every turn by Habermas and his supporters--does not think that Josephus had got the date wrong, but supposes instead that there was another Theudas, who did much the same as the one in Josephus, but a few decades earlier.[2] Gamaliel continues by saying that after Theudas there was a Messianic rising under Judas the Galilean at the time of the census. Luke knows of only one census, that under Quirinius (Luke 2:1-2) of AD 6--forty years before Theudas. In his gospel Luke compounds the muddle by dating this census of AD 6 under Herod, who died in 4 BC. The Catholic scholar Fitzmyer concedes that such serious errors in the dating of Palestinian events of the first half of the first century show that 'on many of these issues Luke's information was not the best'."

From another article by Jeffrey Jay Lowder

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/strobel-rev.html" target="_blank">The rest of the story</a>

" Historian Larry Taylor writes, "Fitzmyer, in the Anchor Bible, surveys the wreckage of all the attempts to save the accuracy of Luke. All of the approaches are failures."[16]
"

BF

[ October 19, 2002: Message edited by: Benjamin Franklin ]</p>

Ion

Again Leonarde,
most of my previous post is about my experience with history in France, and in Western Europe.

Read it carefully.

It takes me observation from close range to form my perception, because Western Europe and US are strikingly different in cultures.

Consider these examples from Europe, unheard of in US:
.) there are 35 hours in a work week in France,
.) France -the former president said- shouldn't be a society of work but should be a society of leisure,
.) people who come to work overtime during week ends in France "take away jobs from the unemployed",
.) someone rich in France "must have wronged lots of people around him",
.) the Netherlands government pays unemployed people the use of prostitutes in Amsterdam so that the social tension stays always low,
.) 'These Dutch, how unAmerican!' yells a newspaper.

I can elaborate on what I only touched in my previous post and in this post, but it is somewhat off topic here.

The bottom line is:
.) Western Europe is atheistic, including atheistic in historical proofs.
.) In France I saw that history and religion are different.
.) In France and in Western Europe, science is being used for establishing historical proofs.
.) It is so since before I was born.
.) I was taught history like this.
.) The official stance in US, from the US elite, is the same as it is in Western Europe.

US historians William Dever -which I already mentioned in my first post in this thread-, Bryant Wood, Carol Meyers and many more, they make the official US stance in line with the Western Europe stance: history lives by a scientific standard, not by a religious standard.

The general US population lags behind the most up to date education in history, unlike in Europe.
However, already in the Bible-Belt states of Tennessee (I was working in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1999 and 2000) and Alabama, creationism is not anymore in the curriculum of public schools.
People's education is slowly progressing in US too.

[ October 19, 2002: Message edited by: Ion ]</p>

Family Man

It is less that I object to abscribing the term historian to Luke -- at times in Acts he was writing history -- as it is the attempt to turn him primarily into a historian without noting that he was also a Christian polemicist whose major concern was the promotion of the Church, not an objective laying out of the facts. The Luke that wrote the gospel can not be separated from Luke that wrote Acts. A proper understanding of Acts can't be had without understanding that his biases colored his writing.

History is a critical endeavor. What bothers me greatly is the tendency among theists on this board to present the NT as "history" as if it details events as they really happened without any critical analysis at all. Leonarde compares Luke to Thucydides without noting that the latter is primarily concerned with a relatively ordinary human event, that he wrote in much greater detail than Luke ever did, that he frequently presented both sides of an issue (as opposed to the one-sided nature of the NT), that he wrote at a time when the events were occurring, and that he had no particular ax to grind (even though he was an Athenian and a participant in the conflict).

In short, to compare Luke to Thucydides as a historian does a disservice to history in general, and to NT studies in particular as it distorts what Luke really was.

Family Man

Except that is an incredibly overly simplistic view of the events. I could argue that the best judges of Jesus would rather be his family, who Mark describes as believing that Jesus had lost his mind. Who is in a better position to judge him, a group of gullible hero-worshippers who knew him for a few years or his family who knew him for thirty? And that's just one argument. You would still have to demonstrate that the alleged appearances are how the apostles came to believe, and given that people frequently come to believe things that are not true, that is an impossible task.

And your belief in the supernatural doesn't skewer how you evaluate this "evidence"? In fact, I do have an open mind. But while I experience natural events everyday, I've never experienced anything that could be considered supernatural. Nor, despite religious family and friends, do I know of anyone who has or even claims to have experienced a supernatural event. I've also seen supernatural events debunked on many occasions, and while God in the OT frequently produced undeniable miracles (if the stories are to be believed) today he seems to be restricted to the occasional cure of cancers (which never seem to make it into the medical journals). Personally, I'd say the evidence for the supernatural compared to the natural is pretty much nonexistent. In fact, supernatural claims mostly appear to me to be ways of making easy money (see John Edwards or Madame Cleo) or as a way to justify a shaky religious belief (see yourself).

There's a reason why history doesn't concern itself with supernatural claims.

Butters

Leonarde,
I would like to see you answer one point that F.M. raised. If historians should not discount the supernatural events of a document, does that mean we should consider ALL supernatural events recorded in history as true, or just the Jewish/Christian events. If not why?

Vibr8gKiwi

I was away for the weekend, and this thread has grown. But to respond to a reply a little late...

Holy religious mumbo-jumbo Batman! Care to say that in plain English for those of us who haven't been indoctrinated since birth with your particular religious sect and its colloquial vocabulary?

My statement is not a statement of faith. On the contrary, it is completely reasonable. It is not reasonable to think a god would author a message that he wanted people to believe with no "striking attributes" so that it could not be differentiated from the thousands of other stories of divine claim.

If you argue the Bible and its authors are "ordinary," then I have no argument with you. However I wonder why anyone should believe. Certainly I see no reason.

leonarde

Posted by Vibr8gKiwi: What striking attributes are you looking for??? The list of miracles, even if one
allows for an accretion or two, is astonishingly
lengthy. The humiliating death is a jarring element which Jews of that era are unlikely to have invented for their Messiah, let alone someone they held to be divine. The record of the
Acts of the Apostles indicates that in a number of
weeks the Apostles went from cowering in fear lest
they suffer the same fate as Jesus to boldly proclaiming his resurrection. Moreover unlike most
"stories of divine claim" this one can be chronologically pinpointed with considerable accuracy (28 to 35 AD) and geographical accuracy
as well. The demand that the Bible perform some sort of tricks for us is silly.

Cheers!